Fire and Stone

www.fireandstone.com

Threeways House
28-38 George Street
Oxford
OX1 2BJ
Telephone
0844 371 2550
Opening hours
12 midday until late everyday

I experienced the most delightful restaurant on my last visit to Oxford. Fire and Stone, originally established in Covent Garden, was apparently new to Oxford as well to me- it had only opened there in December, and all of my friends were very keen to try this novelty. I therefore agreed, not knowing anything about the restaurant, but happy to follow the general consensus and willfully trusting of my friends’ judgment.

“What sort of food do they do?” I asked various members of our group as we walked the 0.5 miles from New College to Fire and Stone, a distance which could only ever seem significant to me when in Oxford (is it because everything is so close together in Oxford that one’s perspective of distance becomes so totally warped?). No one seemed able to give me a satisfactory answer to this most basic question however. I was vaguely puzzled as to why everyone had settled on this restaurant of completely unknown cuisine as the best place to go for a meal, but felt that I, who was in fact only there as a friend of a friend of the person whose birthday outing it was, wasn’t really in a position to challenge this seemingly completely illogical decision.

We arrived, and I was immediately impressed by the decoration. I appreciated the interesting contrast between the modern metal and marble of the upstairs, and the large hearth and stacked logs which gave the downstairs open kitchen a much more traditional feel. After my initial approval, I did become mildly exasperated however when had to wait about 15 minutes before a table became available for us. Our party had booked a table, but it had turned out that there were now more people than there were originally going to be (probably partly my fault!), so the restaurant was not really to blame on that account.

Once we had eventually been seated, the service was prompt and efficient. In fact, after having seen the range of choice on the menu, I actually had to ask to be given longer before I was ready to order. Fire and Stone is basically a classier and more exciting than average pizza restaurant (I hadn’t been overjoyed when I initially discovered this as pizza is never top of my list when it comes to eating out), but their range of toppings were so diverse and delicious sounding, that trying to decide which one might be marginally more delicious or interesting than the others was no easy task. The idea was that the menu was split up into different sections for different continents, and each section had a selection of pizzas inspired by the foods of different well-known cities in each continent.

To give a few examples, my 3 finalists were: Athens (red pepper sauce, mozzarella, vine ripened tomatoes, spinach, feta cheese, pine nuts, and pesto sauce), Bombay (tandoori chicken, broccoli, sliced red onion, mozzarella, mango chutney, and cucumber & mint yoghurt) and Cairo (peppers, courgettes, aubergines, red onions, goat’s cheese, and pine nuts). Byron Bay (pesto, mushrooms, cumin roasted sweet potato, cherry vine tomatoes, mozzarella, green olives, and crushed macadamia nuts) also came in as a late contender, but I decided on the Cairo in the end, and was absolutely delighted with my choice. The flavours worked wonderfully, it had a generous amount of the toppings, was just moist enough, and the base was thin and crispy to the perfect extent.

Price-wise, it was thoroughly reasonable- I paid £7.95 for my Cairo pizza. The prices for all the pizzas were pretty similar and all within a range of £7.45- £9.45. A reasonable range of starters was also available, mostly around the £5 mark, though none of our group actually tried any. Substantial and pleasant sounding salads were on the menu too for about the same price as the pizzas, but also went unsampled by our group.

I recommend this restaurant whole-heartedly, and I would certainly visit the Oxford branch again to sample the pizzas that posed significant threats to Cairo in vying for my attention. Or perhaps I shall try the Covent Garden branch when next in London. I would definitely make an effort to get to a Fire and Stone restaurant again.